Deeplinks Blog posts about Privacy

Email. Online banking. Facebook. Your doctor’s office. These are all places where we rely on encryption to keep the private details of our lives safe. Without encryption, none of these services would be remotely safe to use, and even with encryption breaches are too common. We all want the digital world to be safer, not less secure. That’s why EFF joined the nearly 150 privacy and human rights organizations, technology companies and trade associations, and individual security and policy experts who sent a letter urging President Obama to

We now have the first decision from a court of appeals on the NSA’s mass surveillance program involving bulk collection of telephone records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, and it’s a doozy. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued anopinion inACLU v. Clapper holding that the NSA’s telephone records program went far beyond what Congress authorized when it passed Section 215 of the Patriot Act in 2001. The court completely rejected the government’s secret reinterpretation of Section 215 that has served as the basis for the telephone records collection program.

When is a government rule not a rule? Making that question difficult, when it should be simple, seems to be the government’s leading strategy in a hearing this week in Twitter Inc.’s lawsuit challenging the government’s squelching of its transparency report. Twitter wants to provide a closer look at how often federal agents are demanding private user data for surveillance, and part of its suit fights back against the government's rules on what it can and cannot publish. But the Justice Department has asked a federal judge in Oakland to dismiss portions of Twitter’s lawsuit because, it says, the rules the government cited in denying Twitter the ability to be more transparent aren’t really rules. They’re more like guidelines, the agency says. If you’re having flashbacks about ''Pirates of the Caribbean'' and a certain Captain Barbossa, you’re not alone. More on that later.

Did you just buy a shiny new smartphone loaded with the newest and greatest features to have conversations throughout the day, wherever you are? While your phone’s capabilities are distinctly modern, a new decision in United States v. Davis allowing police to get without a warrant records of which cell tower your phone connects to ensures that a key privacy protection you should have when using your phone is stuck in 1979.

The New Orleans Advocate recently published a shocking story that details the very real threats to privacy and civil liberties posed by law enforcement access to private genetic databases and familial DNA searching.

In 1996, a young woman named Angie Dodge was murdered in her apartment in a small town in Idaho. Although the police collected DNA from semen left at the crime scene, they haven’t been able to match the DNA to existing profiles in any criminal database, and the murder has never been solved.